Alexander Chancellor

In one of those futile bits of research on which academics waste time and money in the pathetic hope of getting mentioned in the press, Hiroshima University in Japan claims to have discovered that people work harder if they have a picture of a pet on their desk. This finding was considered so interesting by the Daily Telegraph that it reported it on its front page with the advice that ‘looking at pictures of puppies and kittens could improve your concentration by a tenth’. I wouldn’t have thought many people had photographs of pets on their desks, and I certainly don’t. But I do have the real thing sitting on a chair beside me, and she isn’t improving my concentration one bit.

For the fifth year running my nearest village in Northamptonshire has just hosted a weekend of celebration called ‘Stoke Bruerne: Village at War’. A busy two-day programme of events, including a Spitfire fly-past, a bread-and-dripping and spam-sandwich tuck-in, and classes in how to dance the Lambeth Walk, started on Saturday morning with a formal opening ceremony by Winston Churchill and Field Marshal Montgomery lookalikes and ended on Sunday afternoon with an air raid ‘all clear’. Stoke Bruerne lies on the Grand Union Canal about halfway between London and Birmingham; and Village at War was organised by Friends of the Canal Museum there to raise money for that worthy institution. It was a great success.

Who wants to be a millionaire? The answer is practically everybody. Who wouldn’t want a life of financial ease in which every need was affordable? But since the vast majority of us will never achieve this blessed state, we try to persuade ourselves that it is not such a happy one. When people believed in God, they could take comfort in the prospect of a happy afterlife. But now they must convince themselves that here on this earth they are no less content than the very rich. Unfortunately, this is not easy.

There are moments when I suddenly realise how old I am, and one was during the closing ceremony of the Paralympics last Sunday. The pride that had gradually swelled within me during this long patriotic summer was extinguished at a stroke by the performance of the rock band Coldplay. Coldplay may be one of the most successful and popular bands in the world, and its leader may be married to Gwyneth Paltrow, but its grim music filled me with despondency and bewilderment. It seems to have been the underlying aim of all four Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies, from Danny Boyle’s onwards, to redefine Britishness for the world, and it may be that rock bands are an important ingredient in this.

While cocking a snook at the United States to help him win next year’s presidential election, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador has shown callous indifference to the welfare of his diplomats in London whom he has effectively drafted into the service of a very tricky and unpredictable master in the person of Julian Assange. The founder of WikiLeaks thinks that his sojourn in the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge will last only six months to a year, because he expects Sweden to have dropped its sex allegations against him by then; but even that may be more than enough time to reduce his hosts to a state of quivering rage and resentment.

What has happened to Italy, a country that not even Mussolini could discipline? It used to be cheerfully anarchic and self-indulgent: cars parked haphazardly all over pavements, long lunches and long siestas, fat tummies full of pasta. Officialdom, though bloated and intrusive, could also be flexible.

The difference between the mood before the Olympic Games and the one after their first week was enormous. The earlier mood was one of gloom and foreboding; the subsequent one of festive exuberance and goodwill. During my visits to London from Northamptonshire during the weeks before the Queen’s encounter with James Bond I found nothing but anxiety and resentment. Taxi drivers in particular were surly and despondent; one told me he had yet to meet a fellow driver that was anything other than furious and resentful about the prospective traffic disruption and the loss of business about to be caused by the provision of private limousines to thousands of corrupt foreign bureaucrats.

Ofcom, the body that regulates the communications industry, says that for the first time people in Britain prefer texting or sending emails to each other to talking on the telephone. Telephone use fell by an amazing 5 per cent in 2011, while over 150 billion text messages were sent in the same year, more than double the number four years earlier. This is a dramatic change, but one that nobody seems to have particularly wanted. Young people — those between 16 and 24 — told Ofcom that they would prefer to discuss things with others face to face, but somehow they don’t do so; instead, 96 per cent of them communicate daily with friends and family with text messages of one kind or another.

There have been enough monsters after them — Denis Nielsen, Peter Sutcliffe, Harold Shipman, Fred West — but the 1960s Moors Murderers still arouse the greatest revulsion. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley didn’t murder as many people as those other serial killers: their victims were only five. But they were all children, sexually abused, tortured and then killed with unspeakable cruelty. The case of the ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey is the most dreadful.

When the man from the Cabinet Office telephoned, he was anxious to find out why I hadn’t replied to a letter asking if I would find it ‘agreeable’ to be appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. I told him I hadn’t got the letter, which he said had been posted to me c/o Guardian for which I used to write a column. (The letter, in an envelope labelled ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’, ‘urgent’, ‘strictly private’, and stuff like that, was eventually forwarded to me, but a month after it had been sent, already opened and resealed with Sellotape.)  In response to my puzzlement, the civil servant said, ‘This is not a hoax.

I came down to earth with a thump after the spellbinding Jubilee weekend by attending a Speeding Awareness Course at the Sixfields Football Stadium in Northampton. It lasted four and a quarter hours and was held in the windowless shareholders’ lounge of the Northampton Football Club, not a nice place in which to spend a long afternoon. I had been tempted to pay a fine and have three points put on my currently clean driving licence rather than undergo this dispiriting experience, especially as I had already been on a Speeding Awareness Course four years earlier and knew what I was in for. On both occasions I had been caught by a speed camera going 35mph along a road with a 30mph limit and was offered the option of indoctrination as an alternative to a formal punishment.

I have bought myself a floating wooden duck house for my pond in Northamptonshire. It is not a fancy one, just two little back-to-back nesting boxes on a raft under a pitched roof; and it cost £270, roughly a tenth of what you would now have to pay for a duck house of the sort favoured by Sir Peter Viggers, who, until he was shamed into auctioning it for charity, had a magnificent replica of an 18th-century Swedish pavilion topped by a cupola on his pond in Hampshire. But unlike the former MP for Gosport, who got the taxpayer to foot the bill, I had to pay for my duck house myself, so I chose the cheapest I could find.

When I was about to start a weekend colour supplement for the Independent in 1988, I got a note from the poet James Fenton containing a list of ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ about what to put in it. The one that has stuck in my mind was to include no articles about Tuscany. This was very good advice, but far from easy to act upon. Those parts of the media concerned with ‘lifestyle’ were then obsessed with Tuscany, having recently invented the ghastly word ‘Chiantishire’ to embrace the idea that the area between Florence and Siena had become a sort of English upper-class preserve. This was strange, because the British were very thin on the ground there.

I’ve been sitting on a sofa in my wife’s house in Tuscany reading an article about a new play that has just opened in New York. It’s by David Auburn, it’s called The Columnist and it’s about Joseph Alsop, a once powerful Washington journalist who died more than 20 years ago. The article, from the New York Times, says that Joe is now a completely forgotten man, but not by me. The pale terracotta-coloured cover of the sofa I’ve been sitting on is a reminder of him. For it was Joe who recommended the Washington seamstress that stitched it for me — an excellent woman who, he claimed, had been one of President Kennedy’s innumerable mistresses.

I am lucky with my brother John. Although he is 12-and-a-half years older than me, he doesn’t patronise or seek to undermine me. On the contrary, he is wholly supportive of my modest endeavours, whatever they may be. Although, at the end of a successful and varied career as a publisher, author and bookseller, he is still dealing in old books, he doesn’t do as much as he used to. He will be 85 this summer and suffers from Parkinson’s Disease. But he takes a keen interest in whatever I get up to, and he shuffles off to the newsagent to buy any publication that I have written something for. Then he usually rings up to say something nice about it. Elder brothers are not always like this, as the Pope and the leader of the Labour party can testify.

The most common lie you hear on the telephone is the one in which a recorded voice says, ‘Your call is important to us.’ Do not be fooled. Your call is not important to anyone, except to the extent that it warns an organisation that you would like to talk to one of its employees. Alarm bells go off, drawbridges are pulled up, and procedures are put into effect to ensure that you are thwarted in this presumptuous ambition. Members of staff then return to their peaceful routines, such as flirting with each other on the internet. Companies pretend to put their customers first, but everyone knows that they don’t. Their normal priority is to arrange things for their own comfort and convenience.

For a country in which ‘gay marriage’ is supposedly still illegal it seems to be happening rather a lot. Gay weddings are already big business, and hard-pressed country house owners are desperate to host them. One grandee who has cashed in spectacularly is Earl Spencer, brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Five years ago he let out Althorp, Diana’s childhood home and burial place, for three days of lavish celebration by a couple of American gays and their many guests for what was admiringly described in Tatler as ‘Britain’s first high-society gay wedding’.

To say that you live in south Northamptonshire doesn’t usually inspire much envy. Not many people dream of living between Northampton and Milton Keynes. But from where I’m sitting at my kitchen table I have a peaceful view over the wide and shallow valley of the river Tove, dominated on the horizon by the handsome tower of the church of St Mary the Virgin in the village of Grafton Regis, where Henry VIII used to stay when he went deer-hunting with Anne Boleyn.